11 Grown-Up Things I've Just Accepted I'll Never Be Good At

Now that I'm OLDER than my parents were when they got married and had a kid, I often feel compelled to, you know, "be an actual human adult." But sometimes, no matter how mature and responsible I try SO HARD REALLY to act, there's a handful of 'mature' things I've just accepted I will never be capable of, no matter how old I get. Maybe in my 70s??

I still haven't found a good balance between my Dad's approach (be at the Gate 9 hours in advance standing in a sprinter's start position ready to run onto the plane at a millisecond's notice) and my own usual approach (say "oh fuck oh fuck why didn't I leave earlier" to yourself the entire way there while pre-emptively coming up with excuses for why you missed the flight that make you look PLAUSIBLY screwed-over, i.e., the Airtrain EXPLODED. Lightly. Lightly exploded, causing it to be late.)

Then you make the flight anyway and so you do the exact same thing again for the rest of your life.

Remember mail? It's NOT just a thing you hear parts-of-words about when skipping past Stamps dot com ads on podcasts. Apparently, it's a very nice grown-up thing to send people 'Thank You Cards' after they, like, come to something you did or whatever, then to MAIL those cards in the mail and the people open the cards and are like "great!" and save / remember them forever.

Also you have to send them out, like, a day or two after the event, when you are most in the mood to continue doing more work. Everybody wins!

Whoops, my plane ticket home is usually $180 but for Christmastime it's up to $5300. If I book it now but just keep in my mind that I KNOW I should've booked it months ago, can I get the old price? Is there a "Shucks Mister Website, I Sure Done Learned My Lesson Up Good!" button on Orbitz? Better call.

Ehh, I don't want to call. I'll see if it's cheaper tomorrow.

Man, have you ever BEEN to a grown-up's place? Not only do they HAVE more than two rooms at their homes, but they also have STUFF in every room! Nicely arranged stuff! Stuff on the floor, stuff on the walls, nonfunctional pillows and lamps and shit, BOWLS, you name it!

Where do they get this stuff? Pier One? Triple-B? Do they call Bed Bath and Beyond Triple-B? So many things I'll just sit here on my one piece of furniture next to the poster I plan to frame eventually and ponder.

I guess I could probably watch a one-minute Youtube video and learn how to actually wrap gifts nicely for the rest my life, but on the other hand, [note: go back and finish this sentence with good points]

Oh man, speaking of staying at parents' homes -- do those guys have EXTRA SHEETS or what?? Also, you need some towels? Holy shit do they got 'em. Anything else? PRINTER? Uhhh, yah, I'm prettay sure they can hook you up. Giant thing of cookies for your two-day stay that you're guilted into finishing? GOOD NEWS...

Now you want me to think AHEAD to what I might be cooking tomorrow?? Like some sort of FOOD Nostradamus? Or just regular Nostradamus, cause I guess he could probably see food in the future if we wanted to use his powers in that way? I might not even be ALIVE tomorrow, or the Earth may have descended into a dystopian chaos world where the government doesn't exist and the only item of any value is sweet potatoes, which I JUST BOUGHT (score).

Also if I don't have groceries for tomorrow it'll be really easy to convince myself to order pizza ("plus you just cooked yesterday, so you're not being that unhealthy...") etc.

At some point, do you just reach an age where you go to bed at a nice, normal time every night then voluntarily wake up at 7:45 am and stretch and start your day? Cause it certainly seems like actual-adults are capable of this? Or were my parents secretly apathetically staying up til like 4:30 am doing whatever the pre-internet equivalent was to streaming Netflix shit? (Reading Field & Stream Magazine? Like, together? With headphones on for some reason, plugged into nothing? Probably that.)

Who keeps extra batteries at home and KNOWS where to find them when they need them? No matter how old I get, I'm completely destined to go shopping for lightbulbs every time a lightbulb burns out (or 3 of them burn out and I can't ignore it anymore) then I go home, replace them, and store the remaining lightbulb somewhere "I'll remember," to never see it again until 7 months from now when I'm frantically searching for my Passport the night before a vacation.

I was gonna make a joke about how I clean my oven "once every [exaggeratedly long amount of time]" but I realized mid-joke that I have literally never cleaned my oven so, cool.

I still don't believe this, weirdly, but maybe next year I'll have this epiphany?

Other adult things you've given up on ever getting the hang of? Leave them in thecomments.